I invested in Tesla extremely early (2011) because electric cars, if built correctly, would obviously make great cars, and Elon was one of the few people I actually thought had a shot at doing it.
I was right that blockchain was BS and all the "not sure about Bitcoin, but blockchain will be big" people were idiots.
I've been right for the last couple of years on AI and that people were vastly underestimating it when it came to it's coding potential. And I put my money where my mouth was here. In 2021 when GPT-3 came out I decided almost immediately I needed to invest a significant amount of my net worth in Google simply as hedge against AI destroying knowledge work jobs. Which at the time I thought was probably going to happen around 2030 not realising how far LLMs could go with reasoning.
I'm not particularly intelligent ("only" top 1-2% IQ), but my ability to predict the future is very good. If you have a skill you're unusually good you might relate to how it's strange other people find it so hard to do that thing you find kinda easy. For me that's predicting things and computers.
Since I was a young teen I have been worrying about AI. Most of my IRL best friends I have made from talking about AI risk in 2010s when I was studying AI.
Admittedly I got some of the details wrong back then. In 2010 I thought a lot of manual labour jobs would be easier to automate first – warehouse work, mail, taxis, buses, trains, etc. I worried primarily about the economic and political ramifications, and much less about ASI scenario (at least in this half of the century). But I think still I got the general timeframes and direction right. This was the decade I was concerned about.
I'm so scared right now... My whole life I've had nightmares about AI. I know there are some people who talk about how AI is an existential risk, but it feels like they don't internalise it like I do. They're not prepping like me for one, not that you really can prep for what's coming. If they're concerned why don't they have the nightmares of the omnipresent AI which you can't out think or punch to protect those you love? AI is so powerful in the scariest ways. Super viruses, mass surveillance and control, mind reading, unimaginable sci-fi weapons. It's like a horror story, but suddenly real.
I am an OG AI doomer, but until the last few months I've at least always had some doubt in my mind about whether I'm right, perhaps not about the risk of AI broadly, but about whether we'd actually be able to develop highly capable AIs while I still have a lot of my life ahead of me.
In my opinion this time is different, and what I've been worrying about for the last couple of decades is now here.
We are collectively the indigenous peoples of America and the Europeans have just arrived in the new world. The risk vectors are now endless and how this all plays out is hard to know exactly. What we do know is that the majority of ways this will play out are bad, and some are incomprehensibly bad. Some may achieve status and wealth in the near-term, but longer-term we're all dead, or worse.
I always worry these comments make me sound like a lunatic, I think I am, but I hope I am. I hope you will all forgive me, but I just need to shout about this tonight while I still can. We need to stop this insanity. Data centers need to be nuked. You may doubt me now, but in time you will understand. Hopefully I won't be around to say I told you so. Please make the best of the time we have left.